A Pre-Print Information System in Qing Governance: Computational History of the Yongzheng Vermilion-Rescript Memorials

The palace-memorial (zouzhe) system reached its fullest articulation under the Yongzheng emperor (1723–1735): memorials bearing vermilion rescripts (zhupi) circulated between the throne and provincial officials, forming a vast administrative record. Historians have relied on close reading of selected exemplars. We ask what changes when the corpus becomes computable. In a system whose bottleneck was imperial attention itself, these documents record how a state managed overflow: prioritisation, verification, and the reproduction of administrative knowledge. We present a computational-history framework that fuses SikuBERT, a BERT model pre-trained on classical and historical Chinese, with the three-level coding of grounded theory. SikuBERT supplies dense semantic representations of memorial texts; open, axial and selective coding organises these into historically meaningful categories, from genre and subject to the tone and urgency of imperial feedback. The two components run iteratively, not sequentially: codings are checked against model outputs and re-derived from the representations, keeping distant reading accountable to close reading. The framework makes systematic analysis of massive historical collections tractable, and keeps interpretation firmly in the historians' hands, replacing exemplar-driven narrative with corpus-scale evidence. Applied to the Yongzheng corpus, the framework traces how information was generated, fed back and reproduced under the memorial system, offering new empirical evidence for information behaviour in Qing state governance. The framework is designed to extend across reigns and document types; we outline how large language models will enter the pipeline next, through assisted coding, corpus-wide hypothesis generation, and dialogue with the archive. The memorial system thus offers an instructive precedent for the computational study of pre-print cultures: a state-run information regime whose “language model” was the emperor himself.